Not too many American's are familiar with the Amiga -- a US-designed machine that had its greatest success in Germany and the UK -- but Mercury News Technology Columnist Dan Gillmor gave it a namecheck in his column on MacExpo. He wrote that "while Jobs is one of the world's greatest product pitchmen, he isn't above exaggerating, or worse, in his keynotes. On Tuesday, for example, he noted the 20th anniversary of the Macintosh and said it was '10 years ahead of the rest of the industry.' Come on. The Mac was a great advance, for sure. But the Commodore Amiga, which also appeared in the 1980s, upped the ante even if it didn't ultimately prevail in the market."
The Amiga had much better colour graphics and sound than the Mac, which was monochrome at the time, and the Mac couldn't multitask as well as a 1985 Amiga until OS X came out. (The Amiga was widely used to produce professional television graphics and won an Emmy for Babylon-5.) Another advantage of the Amiga, of course, was that you didn't have to pay the sort of prices Apple gouged out of unfortunate UK buyers. At one time, it was roughly as cheap for a Londoner to buy a Mac in New York including the cost of the airfare.
